Fleet tracking systems for service vehicle fleets have been under development for many years in various forms. Many different types of services use fleet tracking systems, including vehicle for hire services that transport persons, such as taxi, limousine, bus, and shuttle companies, delivery companies that transport goods such as local and long haul delivery companies, and business service companies (plumbers, utilities, exterminators, etc.). Fleet tracking serves a variety of functions including but not limited to basic vehicle tracking, geo-fencing, time card tracking and speed limit compliance. In order to be used for this system, the fleet tracking service must perform the basic function of locating the position of vehicles in the fleet. This can be done through a variety of technologies but is most often achieved through the use of GPS tracking devices installed in the vehicles. The geographic position and sometimes additional information (e.g., speed, heading) is relayed from the vehicles to a central location using some form of wireless communications channel.
One limitation of existing fleet tracking systems is that are intended to track the vehicles only in one or more specifically designated fleets, such as the taxis of a particular taxi company (or group of companies) or the trucks of a particular utility company, and thereby do not track the vehicles in other fleets. A second limitation is that the location information is only provided to an internal employee of the fleet company or dispatch agency, and is not exposed to end users, such as persons needing a vehicle for hire for a pick up, or a person needing to know the location of a nearby delivery vehicle. In particular, end users cannot query a private company's fleet tracking system to obtain information about nearby service vehicles.
Another aspect of fleet tracking and management is vehicle dispatching. Vehicle dispatching of service vehicles is performed a variety of ways. In some cases, specific routes are determined prior to a vehicle leaving the dispatch center. In others, the vehicle is routed in an “on demand” fashion. Hybrid systems can have aspects of both types of approaches. “For hire” vehicles use all of these dispatch methods. For example, a limousine in a limousine service may be given a known set of customers for pickup and set of routes at the start of a day. By contrast, a taxi is typically dispatched on demand as end users call in to the dispatch agent. A shuttle may have a predetermined set of routes, followed by a period of on demand scheduling. The same variety of dispatch methods exists for delivery vehicles (e.g., package pick up or drop off) and other business service vehicles (e.g., utility service, electrical service, plumbing service, towing service).
Today, most end users searching for these service providers will select based on word of mouth reference, directories, known providers. For vehicle for hire, an end user may just raise a hand and hail the nearest cab. Users are most likely unaware of which provider has the most vehicles, the closest vehicle or the highest density of vehicles in any given area. In addition, users may want regular updates on the proximity of the vehicle to themselves or another point of interest such as how long it will take for the shuttle to arrive or how far away the cable repair man is.
Thus, it would be desirable to provide a system that could collect the information from a variety of fleet management systems and provide position information directly to end users to help them make decisions and/or keep them informed.